“We have no reason
to mistrust our world,
for it is not
against us.
Has it terrors,
they are our terrors;
has it abysses,
those abysses belong to us;
are dangers at hand,
we must try
to love them…
How should we
be able to forget
those ancient myths
about dragons
that at the least moment
turn into princesses;
perhaps all the dragons
of our lives
are princesses
who are only waiting
to see us
once beautiful
and brave.”

“It is like reconstructing the whole of Paris from Lego bricks. It’s about three-quarters-of-a-million small decisions. It’s not about who will live and who will die and who will go to bed with whom. Those are the easy ones. It’s about choosing adjectives and adverbs and punctuation. These are molecular decisions that you have to take and nobody will appreciate, for the same reason that nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony in a concert hall, except when the note is false. So you have to work very hard in order for your readers not to note a single false note. That is the business of three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.”